Bess Streeter Aldrich: The Dreams Are All Real by Carol Petersen, and: Bess Streeter Aldrich: Collected Short Works, 1907–1919 ed. by Carol Petersen (review)

Reviews 81 fame, screenplay collaborations with Stanley Kubrick, and his gradual decline in Hollywood’s debilitating tinseltown. Polito also notes that though Thompson did not begin as a crime writer, the True Crime magazine style of “incredulous horror” did influ­ ence Thompson’s fiction. But rather than transcend this tradition, Thompson chose to sink himself “into the clichés so deeply that they are flipped on their heads.” Polito’s biography reveals the origins of those dark features in Thompson’s writings: child abuse, family trauma, and the vicious punishment awaiting all failures within the American Dream. Savage Art is an important achievement. But Polito astutely leaves other paths—ones that would take up entire books—for successors to fol­ low: he leaves relatively unexplored the Swiftian satirical imagery that surely attracted Stanley Kubrick to Thompson; more work is needed to explain the “psychopathic personality” of many of Thompson’s charac­ ters; and further exploration of the “dime store Dostoevsky” definition first suggested by Geoffrey O’Brien could be developed. However, Polito defines Jim Thompson as an important figure in a western American literary tradition that extends to the present. If the real Jim Thompson never became Lou Ford, a “naturalist novelist” who “plays God,” his art often bore an uncomfortable resemblance to reality. TONY WILLIAMS Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Bess Streeter Aldrich: The Dreams Are All Real. By Carol Petersen. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. 247 pages, $35.00.) Bess Streeter Aldrich: Collected Short Works, 1907— 1919. Edited by Carol Petersen. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. 246 pages, $40.00.) Carol Petersen’s recent biography of Bess Streeter Aldrich fills gaps in our knowledge of this still widely read midwestern author. Although Aldrich’s novels were best-sellers in her lifetime and three of them have never been out of print, this biography is, surprisingly, the first to be writ­ ten. Neither Aldrich’s life nor her works has attracted the close attention and intensive analysis accorded many of her contemporaries, possibly because her life and work have seemed so simple and transparent that they require little comment. In composing the biography, Petersen has used materials made avail­ able to her by Aldrich’s family—much of it available for the first time— 82 Western American Literature and has benefited from interviews with family members and neighbors and friends who still live in Elmwood, Nebraska, where Aldrich lived dur­ ing most of her adult life. The resulting biography shows Aldrich’s life to have been transparent and, in many ways, exemplary—but not entirely simple. After her husband’s sudden death in 1925, and her realization that she could, and would have to, support herself and four young children by being an author, Aldrich made the decision to remain in the small town of Elmwood rather than move to the East Coast, where she would have been closer to publishers, editors, agents, and other writers. Thus she began a kind of double life as not only one of the most sought after short-story writers and best-selling novelists in the nation, but also a “home town” woman, raising four children, crossing the street to talk to a neighbor when she wanted company, belonging to a sewing circle, and serving as a partner in a local bank. At the same time she made many trips to NewYork and California, where she was often honored and where she sometimes lectured. Both her energy and her enjoyment of these excursions from home are evidenced by her report of one three-week trip to New York City where she “attended six Broadway plays and saw sixteen movies,” in addition to going to museums and conferring with publishers. In addition to providing this excellent biography, Petersen has also collected and published Aldrich’s early stories—The Collected Short Works: 1907-1919—written for magazines like McCall’s,Delineator, and Harper’s Weekly. Most of these stories have not been reprinted before, and one finds among them a number of repeated plots. More than one story, for example, deals with a young woman’s choice between two men, one rich and worldly and another not rich (but with potential) whom she...